Lead, Kindle light

Finally, it came down to us or them. The house was just not big enough for both parties. And, like Pakistan which keeps trying to extend its Line of Control (LoC), they kept pushing forward their LoC, so that there was literally no room left for Bunny and me.

That’s when we bought our Kindle. To stop the invasion of books that was threatening to drive us out of our home. Books on shelves, books on the floor, books on top of books, and books on top of our heads. Both of us have always been avid readers, and our home is so crammed with books that eventually – after unsuccessful attempts at donating them to institutions – we had to give them to the raddiwala.

Give books to the raddiwala? Literature should never be treated so shabbily. Not even potboiler literature which could aptly be described as litter-ature. That’s when Bunny thought of getting an eBook Reader, the small device – the size of a slim paperback – on which you can read eBooks.

Wary of any form of technology, i was dubious at first. But i saw the logic of Bunny’s reasoning. For compulsions of space, we either had to stop buying and reading more books – unbearable thought! – or we had to switch to eBooks.

Apparently there are whole libraryfuls of eBooks, hanging out there – or should that be hanging in there? – in cyberspace, lurking within something called the Cloud, just waiting to be downloaded onto your local, user-friendly eReader. Many of these books – more than 30,000 – are free; others cost a fraction of what their print counterparts do.

So we could read, and keep, as many books as we liked and not worry about where to store them, what with literally thousands of them conveniently fitting into the pocket of my pants in the form of our eReader. Nor did we face the pangs of guilt about forests being chopped down to provide paper for the paperless books we read.

The eReader – which itself cost little more than about a dozen hardback books – was a win-win proposition for everyone, except possibly the raddiwala.

But is eReading the same as real reading, reading a real book? In some ways it’s better. You can enlarge the print to suit your eyesight. You can read in the dark, because the device is backlit and can be made brighter or dimmer at will. And, at the tap of a finger your eReaderwill give you the meaning of a word you don’t understand. Goodbye, Oxford English Dictionary.

Yes, but what about the sheer sensuous pleasure of holding and reading a real book? The glossy texture of the cover, smooth against your hands; the creak of the binding as you open the book; the whisper of the pages as you turn them, asking you ‘What’s next? What’s next?’; the scent of ink and paper, an enticing fragrance unlike any other that we know. How do you get all that with an eReader?

I have a hunch that the eReader guys are already working on special apps which will make eReading as sensory a pleasure as print reading, the feathery touch of pages and the smell of ink and binding glue included. And to cap it all – app it all? – when you open your next-generation eReader maybe out will slither an e-version of – what else? – a diehard bookworm.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .